


from the blood-stained sea, come out, come out

by AureliaAstralis



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pacific Rim (2013), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, And Darcy, BAMF Women, Barney dies, Bucky just gets around a lot (with different jaegers), Canon Crossover, Clint needs hugs too, Coulson is still Coulson, Fury still loses an eye, Gen, Implied Relationships, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), Jane can also kick kaiju ass, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), Natasha instills the fear of God into new recruits, Past Relationship(s), Peter is a secret kaiju groupie, Pietro thinks she's crazy, Ross is still a dick, Steve is a celebrity, Thor and Loki are actual brothers, Tony makes his own jaeger because he can, Wanda thinks kaiju babies are cute, and Bruce needs hugs, and Pepper helps him, so does maria, so is Obie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:00:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 9,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2693957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AureliaAstralis/pseuds/AureliaAstralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“We always thought alien life would come from the stars, but it came from deep beneath the Pacific. The first kaiju made land in San Francisco. The second attack hit Manila, and the third one hit Cabo. Then, we learned this was not going to stop. In order to fight monsters… we created monsters of our own. We needed a new weapon, and the Jaeger Program was born. Two pilots – our minds, our memories, connected – and man and machine become one.”</i> || <b>avengers + pacific rim au</b></p><p>Snapshots of a world where hero vs. villain lies more along the lines of man vs. monster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Icarus Liberty || Steve Rogers + Bucky Barnes

**Name: Icarus Liberty**  
 **Classification: Mark-I**  
 **Pilots: Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes**  
 **Deployment: Anchorage Shatterdome, July 2015**  
 **Solo Kills: 1**  
 **Team Kills: 4**  
 **Captures: 0**  
 **Status: Destroyed, January 2017**

* * *

Bucky is one of the first to join the Jaeger program, but when Steve tries to join, the health concerns around radiation poisoning prevents him from enlistment. Bucky is juggled amongst trainees for months, incompatible with everyone, but one day Steve walks through the training room door, a foot and a half taller and at least a hundred pounds heavier, and Bucky can only laugh in joy and disbelief. Steve rambles something about radiation shielding and updated systems, but Bucky doesn’t care and hauls Steve in for a hug.

Along with an international fleet of Jaegers dubbed  _the Howling Commandos_ by the media, Bucky and Steve pilot the first American Mark-I Jaegers, Icarus Liberty – a beauty specializing in head-on-head grappling and wielding a forearm shield capable of withstanding the strongest of attacks. Together with the Japanese Aurora Onyx, Rogue Dauntless from Lima, and Hong Kong’s Striver Nebula, they take down a kaiju off the coast of the Philippines.

They’re instant celebrities, Steve even moreso than the other Rangers, but they immediately band together like family. Dum-Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones, best friends and Marines stationed in Buenos Aires before everything started, drive Dauntless like she’s a wrestler and bicker in Spanish like real siblings. American Jim Morita and French Jacques Dernier, who were exchange students studying in Tokyo when the attacks hit, refer to Aurora as their ‘ _shared wife_ ,’ which drives the media into a frenzy for months before someone finally figures out the joke. Then, all the attention is transferred to Nebula’s pilots Monty Falsworth and Peggy Carter, British ex-pats who reveal very quickly that they are distant cousins, and not even the least bit interested in each other romantically.

In reality, Steve’s the one halfway in love with Peggy – Bucky always gives him shit for making cow eyes at her during press conferences. Steve’s in no hurry to make a move; he’s always been one of those wait-and-see kind of guys, too shy to even start conversations about anything besides official Jaeger business or nonsensical babblings about the weather. He tells himself next time, after the next attack, but the  _Commandos_ rack up three more team kaiju kills, and over a year passes. And then months later, when Nebula is brought over to Anchorage for some weaponry upgrades, Peggy marches up to Steve in the middle of the mess hall and primly informs him that he’s taking her out dancing that Friday. Amongst all the hoots and catcalls and applause, Steve can only nod in shock.

Only it doesn’t happen. Five hours later there’s a report of the first Category-II, making a bee-line towards South Korea. With Nebula half disassembled, Aurora undergoing repairs from its first solo mission, and Dauntless even farther out south, Liberty is deployed with promises of backup within the hour.

An hour comes and goes, and after three hours fending off the kaiju alone, the newly-christened Viperblade contorts itself around Liberty’s body, biting off the jaeger’s left arm and spearing through the Conn-Pod with its sword-like tail. It gouges out the left side Liberty’s entire head, and Steve opens his mouth in a soundless scream as Bucky is ripped out of the neural handshake and plummets down. Steve operates the remains of Liberty long enough to grab the tail and shove it through the kaiju’s own skull. His head pounds as he tries to salvage the remains of Liberty left in the water – of Bucky, still in the water – but then Viperblade thrashes out in one last effort and knocks Liberty off her feet. Steve blacks out to icy water and sparks, numbness swallowing him.

When Steve wakes up, he’s in a hospital in Hong Kong, body marked with faded scars and his face sporting a full beard. He finds out he’s been in a coma for close to four years, that Bucky’s body was never found, and that Herald Liberty was now nothing more than a rusted husk of unsalvageable parts, sitting at the very bottom of Oblivion Bay.


	2. Jupiter Brave || Nicolas Fury + Phil Coulson

**Given Name: Jupiter Brave**   
**Classification: Mark-II**   
**Pilots: Nicolas Fury, Phil Coulson**   
**Deployment: Anchorage Shatterdome, January 2017**   
**Solo Kills: 1**   
**Team Kills: 0**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Deactivated, March 2017**

* * *

Phil is recruited into the Jaeger Program from his managerial position in the CIA, a desk job overseeing data analysts that has him bored out of his mind – until the first kaiju attacks San Francisco. He’s working twelve-hour shifts, plus overtime, for months before he gets called up to his supervisor’s office in the CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

When he arrives, his eyes fall on an intimidating man in black, looming over his cowering supervisor like the wrath of an angry god, and Phil’s life is changed forever. 

Fury –  _don’t give me that Nicolas crap, Coulson_  – is a harsh taskmaster and trainer, putting Phil through his paces the same as the rest of the Academy trainees, but he's fair and blunt and when he does something right Fury nods at him in acknowledgement. Phil is a grown man, but he can't help it if his pride rises a few notches when he realizes he's one of the few recipients of Fury's respect.  

On the first day of sparring, Phil is surprised when Fury doesn’t pair him up with anyone in the Kwoon Combat Room, and the man just wears a small, knowing smirk as he tosses Phil a staff and takes position across the mat, body tensed and ready.

Fury was obviously expecting it, but Phil is floored when they are tested to be drift compatible.

The Mark-II Jaeger designated for them, Jupiter Brave, is designed with stealth function modes and specially designed reflective armor that makes seeing and sensing it harder for the kaiju they track down and kill. Both he and Fury don’t like relying on the high-tech weapons some of the other Rangers are clamoring for; they prefer the good, old-fashioned way of fighting with their fists. Fury caves though, when Phil sees the specs for a nuclear machine cannon that fires up to a hundred exploding nuclear missiles without reloading – Phil had always been a sucker for heavy firepower, the bigger the better.

They get three. 

They kill a kaiju, Hammerhead, on their first deployment. It’s rougher than they thought it’d be, and at the very end of the battle Fury is blinded in one eye by a lucky headshot that shatters the glass of the Conn-Pod as well as the visor of Fury’s drive suit helmet. When they get back to base, Fury’s eye is deemed unsalvageable, and Fury himself is declared unfit for piloting duty. Instead, he’s called in to the Los Angeles Shatterdome, to work as an Academy fightmaster. Phil, who can’t think of drifting with anyone else, refuses to find another co-pilot and follows after him. Jupiter Brave gets a new round of pilots who never make it past the test drive, and a part of Phil sighs in relief every time he gets news of each failed run.

And when Marshal Chester Phillips retires, Phil is the one who finally gets to see Fury speechless with shock. Phillips names Fury his successor, and Phil smirks throughout the whole promotion ceremony.

Seven years later, Jupiter Brave sits in a storage bunker in Reno, Nevada, while Fury oversees the whole Jaeger program as Marshal from the Los Angeles Shatterdome. Phil, who did his time in J-Tech as a data analyst before climbing the ranks, operates officially as a LOCCENT officer. And on his days off, he does some not-so-official work, jumping around the country as a headhunter for the Jaeger Program. 


	3. Gamma Thunder || Thaddeus Ross + Bruce Banner

**Given Name: Gamma Thunder**   
**Classification: Mark-II**   
**Pilots: Thaddeus Ross, Bruce Banner**   
**Deployment: Los Angeles Shatterdome, January 2017**   
**Solo Kills: 2**   
**Team Kills: 1**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Deactivated, September 2017**

* * *

Ross is a general in the US Army when the first kaiju attacks hit San Francisco, and he is one of the first to sign up for the Jaeger training when the PPDC opens up the Academy. He excels and moves up quickly, paired with Emil Blonsky, but their combined bloodthirstiness and narrow-minded fighting mentality made J-Tech neurologists hesitate when it came to signing off the psychology exams.

It comes as a heavy blow when Blonsky’s legs are crushed in a freak car accident, leaving him crippled and Ross partner-less. For close to a year, Ross weeds through the Academy cadets with increasing frustration, unable to deal with so-called new blood, until he hears the story of an ostracized K-Science Hazmat Officer called Bruce Banner.

He weasels out the whole story from some gossipy K-Science interns. Recruited back for his knowledge of both nuclear physics and biological engineering, Banner's experiments to discover antidotes for kaiju blood poisoning ended up developing deadly neurotoxins that could overload a kaiju brain in less than thirty minutes – with the added side effect of rendering everything within an unknown radius a biological dead zone in less than twelve hours. When Banner went to present his findings, the toxin was determined to be an environmental biohazard, and any trace of its existence gets squirreled away in some secure facility or erased from existence. 

Despite the fact that all the research was destroyed and nothing remains on file digitally, Ross is determined to get his hands on those neurotoxins.

Ross’s forceful personality overwhelms the scientist. Under a guise of friendship, Ross uses his influence to expedite Bruce’s Academy training, disregarding protocol and falsifying compatibility reports. Bruce, bewildered but overjoyed by Ross’s overtures of friendship and interest in his research, lets himself be swept into it all.   
  
Bruce ends up in the Conn-Pod of Gamma Thunder a mere six months later, but it’s quickly apparent that the Mark-II Jaeger they’re assigned is tailored to Ross through and through. With a brawler’s body, relying on strength and armor to bulldoze through any kaiju attacks, Thunder uses the most indiscreet weapons in the entire Jaeger fleet: huge exploding missile launchers embedded in Thunder’s torso, a retractable sword, and steel-reinforced fists. Thunder’s first two kills, one solo and another with an Australian Jaeger, cause unforeseen damage, as Ross’s tactics tended towards using a city as bait and ambushing the kaiju on land.

One day, Bruce lets slip that the confiscated gallons of neurotoxin are locked in a PPDC storage facility in the Mojave Desert, and Ross makes his move. It’s easy enough to get access to the toxins, and a few thousands spent in bribes lets him do as he pleases – and in this case, Ross takes the toxins and pumps them into hollow exploding missile cartridges, ordered custom off the black market to look identical to the ones made for Thunder. It’s as easy as switching the original missiles in the Engineering Bay labs with the new ones, and it ends as a resounding success with devastating effects.

Ross eagerly deploys the neurotoxin-laden missiles during Thunder’s next mission, and it works – two of the six missiles hit home, the rest batted away by the kaiju’s paddle-like tail – and the kaiju dies of the neurotoxin a mere eighty-five minutes after Thunder's deployment. 

It’s the fastest victory recorded in history. Ross basks in the glory and fame, but Bruce recognizes the oil-like residue that coats Thunder’s lower body, a tell-tale fuchsia was hard to see in the dying sunset light but clear as day against glowing blue kaiju blood and an army green paint job back in the Shatterdome. He is quick to realize what Ross has done, and the consequences: the kaiju carcass, too damaged to be of any use and left in the ocean, would poison the entire western coast of South America.

Bruce confronts Ross in front of all the media and major PPDC officials, on live television during the celebratory press conference. There’s a fair amount of scrambling and chaos, but in the few hours that pass after the battle, the entire southeastern Pacific wastes away. Nearly overnight, the waters around Chile and Antarctica become a biological dead zone, killing all wildlife and causing the deaths of thousands along the Chilean coastline. It’s recorded as the most toxic hazardous waste zone in the world.

Ross is put through a quick trial and sentenced to life imprisonment, stripped of his rank and dismissed from the Jaeger program in disgrace. Bruce, put under scrutiny as well, is eventually released from custody, as he had not knowingly assisted Ross’s plans in any way, but the animosity directed towards him for developing the poisons in the first place leads to his quiet disappearance from the Jaeger scene, retreating in disgrace.


	4. Iron Monger || Obadiah Stane + Anthony Stark

**Given Name: Iron Monger**   
**Classification: Mark-III**   
**Pilots: Obadiah Stane, Anthony Stark**   
**Deployment: Anchorage Shatterdome, May 2017**   
**Solo Kills: 2**   
**Team Kills: 2**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Destroyed, January 2019**

* * *

Howard Stark is known as the creator of the very first Jaeger prototype back in 2014, working with Abraham Erksine, who developed the Drift system utilized in the modern Jaegers today.

What the world doesn’t realize is that the prototype isn’t the work of Howard Stark – it’s the brainchild of his genius son.

The death of Howard shortly after the production of the first round of Mark-I Jaegers doesn’t lessen Tony’s anger and fury. Tony, headhunted mere days after his parents’ car accident, is originally pulled into J-Tech, but he wants nothing to do with people who see him as his father’s replacement, or worse, someone chasing his father’s shadow.

Tony’s ultimate dream is to design and pilot a Jaeger, but he knows there’s no way of getting into a drive suit other than through the Academy. In training, it’s easy to gravitate towards Obie, a family friend who listens with a sympathetic ear, plying Tony with women and alcohol. Their favorite pastime is coming up with new weapon designs, Obie pitching ideas as Tony sketches mechanics and specs on napkins during mealtimes. He doesn’t realize that Obie is selling the designs to J-Tech through a dummy corporation and funneling the profits into a private account in Switzerland.

They become Rangers operating Iron Monger, one of the largest Mark-IIIs ever made, and the behemoth is deserving of its name. Heavy set with a low center of gravity and equipped with nuclear flamethrowers in its palms, Monger quickly earns a reputation for ground-shaking maneuvers that cause earthquakes that rattle both sides of the Pacific. One of Tony’s ideas, redesigning the flamethrowers as repulsor beams, gives Monger flight capabilities, but it’s faulty – Tony and Obie are fighting their third Category-III kaiju when the flight reactors fail mid-flight. The kaiju’s relentless thrashing causes additional problems, damaging the fuel tanks and rendering Monger’s flamethrowers useless.

There’s the moment, right before the kaiju wrenches itself free, that both of them realize that everything is going to shit, and in that split second Obie opens his mind and chases the RABIT – out of fear, out of resignation of the inevitable… to this day Tony still doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care. He just lets the memories wash over him: Obie’s jealousy and envy, the ploys of selling Tony’s designs, the backroom deals with black market dealers… everything. And Tony feels betrayed, he feels numb and angry and furious at Obie and Howard and himself, and then they’re weightless.

The kaiju lands first, tremors radiating out like ripples, in the cradle of a valley between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, and Monger falls on top of it, breaking the kaiju’s spine and neck. Monger’s right side is crushed flat, and Tony can feel Obie dying, his mind flickering like a wind-battered candle. He can feel himself dying too – he looks down to see his chest-plate cracked into pieces, bits of metal embedded in both the hard plastic and his skin. Each shaky breath he takes sends a sharp, piercing pain through his chest, and it feels like someone’s nails are digging into his heart.

But he has things he has to do, things that he can’t do if he’s dead.

Tony remembers force ejecting himself from the Conn-Pod and crawling out of the remains of Monger, a makeshift electro-magnet haphazardly clutched to the open wound in his chest as he stumbles into the suburbs of Hilo, Hawai’i. It takes close to forty hours of surgery to get Tony stabilized, but even then they can’t remove the shrapnel. Tony wakes up to his makeshift electro-magnet, cobbled together with bits from his drive suit helmet and what he could reach in the Conn-Pod, wrapped flush against his chest. He doesn’t even feel sad when he hears that Obie died, bleeding out in the ruins of their Jaeger.

He’s given a leave of absence for a year. Tony goes home to his mansion in Malibu, invents an arc reactor to replace the electro-magnet, and then flies to a hospital in Toronto. He pays the heart surgeons there enough money to zip lips and lose hospital records, and Tony walks out of the hospital two weeks later, his thick sweater hiding the dull glow emanating from his chest.


	5. Extremis Rescue || Tony Stark + Pepper Potts

**Given Name: Extremis Rescue**  
 **Classification: Mark-V**  
 **Pilots: Anthony Stark, Pepper Potts**  
 **Deployment: Los Angeles Shatterdome, June 2020**  
 **Solo Kills: 2**  
 **Team Kills: 0**  
 **Captures: 0**  
 **Status: Active**

* * *

In her rural little Ohio town, Virginia Potts grows up being every parent’s dream child: the prom queen and class president of her high school, a commencement speaker and  _magna cum laude_  laureate during college, and a top-10 ranked student at the best post-grad business program America had to offer. Her parents soak up the praise and envy, milking the attention as she’s growing up and pestering her to come visit more often after she goes off to college. They talk endlessly about their perfect daughter: working at Stark Industries  _while_  in school, living in the big city, earning a six-figure salary.

At least, that’s what they think. In reality, Virginia Potts is just a lowly data analyst, working freelance for a scrambling Stark Industries in the wake of Howard Stark’s death and living on the couch of her college ex-roommate.

To this day, she thinks it’s sheer luck – the fact that she catches the mistake that ends up changing her whole future. She isn’t even supposed to be working on the stack of files sitting on Janice’s desk, but the rest of the analysts shove the extra workload on her when Janice calls in sick, and she ends up staying late to fulfill the office quota. She’s the only one in the office, janitors long gone, when she spots an accounting error that could cost Stark Industries millions.

She takes the file in hand and goes to the elevator, stepping into the CEO’s office and leaving the file on the desk with a explanatory note. The next day, she’s called up to the top floor conference room to the hushed whispers of her coworkers, and doesn’t come back. Three hours later, she takes immense pleasure in the stunned looks on their faces as Tony Stark announces the appointment of his new personal assistant, Pepper Potts.

It’s quickly apparent that she’s not just a personal assistant. Tony gets pulled into the Jaeger program, half eager and half reluctant, and although she’s delegated mundane tasks like fetching coffee and making appointments, she ends up basically taking over Tony’s job once he becomes an active Ranger. She runs Stark Industries from behind Tony’s public image while he’s preoccupied with training with Obie or when he holes himself up in his lab, and after Obie dies, she’s left with a multi-billion dollar company as Tony drops off the face of the Earth.

She finds him over a year later, overseeing mechanical operation assemblage in the Los Angeles Shatterdome. She spots him and stalks over, unmindful of the stares that follow her five inch heels and snow white business suit, but stops short once she  _looks_ , and it’s like she just  _can’t_   _stop_   _staring_.

There was once a part of her, a part that thought a happy life meant business suits and designer heels, success and efficiency from the top of a corporate ladder. But when she sees the half-assembled body of that Jaeger, towering and raw and strong, she thinks its one of the most beautiful things she’s ever seen.

Pepper drags Tony back into the business of Stark Industries, but she can’t erase the foolish, stupid dreams she has at night, dreams of standing in a Conn-Pod, her breath fanning across the glass visor of a drive suit helmet. During the days Tony keeps her busy, between rescheduling his many appointments and running Stark Industries through his name, and one day, when she’s filing Tony’s tax returns, she comes across unmarked receipts worth hundreds of thousands.

Pepper is nothing but tenacious, and does some digging. She’s not stupid enough to think Tony's a victim of credit card fraud, not when he built an AI before graduating from college, but what she does find is suspicious. The records, which go back for  _years_ , are really mechanical and material shipment orders, bills from parts manufacturers, fabrication shops, and raw material sellers. Pepper isn’t an expert by any means, but she knows enough from being around Tony’s lab. There are definitely enough parts and materials to build an entire Jaeger from scratch -- and considering that Tony’s being funded by the PPDC and  _technically_  only supposed to be working on building a new Jaeger with the salvaged parts from two dead Mark-2s, she has a gut feeling that she’s right.

Tony casually mentions it before she even says anything, unabashedly flippant about the fact that he’s building a thousand-ton, weaponized power plant capable of wiping out entire cities  _in his goddamn basement_.

He’s been working on it for nearly three years, she discovers, on and off during his Ranger training and eventual deployment, and then full time during his year off before the PPDC pulled him back into engineering. He doesn’t do all the work himself, commissioning companies to pre-assemble parts for him to look over and approve, but Pepper can see that it’s all Tony, his heart poured out into metal and machinery.

It’s different from the ones Tony makes out of dead Jaeger parts for the PPDC – slimmer and streamlined and more humanoid in shape, and that’s not mentioning the bright red and gold paint job he designs carefully and meticulously. Repulsors embedded in the Jaeger’s palms and soles are its primary offensive weapons, but Pepper recognizes the auxiliary munitions as amalgamations of the parts he’s been ordering for the past months – Extremis X59 flamethrowers in the upper chest, kaiju-piercing taser guns and six-round missile launchers in the wrists, augmented back-thrust gear, and concussion beams from the shoulders.

She’s there when Tony welds the last piece of the streamlined armor onto the Jaeger’s chest, a titanium ring encircling an arc reactor core that generates high density muon fusion power –  _clean_  power, at nearly five times the output of the nuclear reactors, with the side benefit of self-generative electromagnetic fields that negate all EMPs. He climbs down and swings her around in a bear hug, laughing joyfully as he stares up at the completed Jaeger with stars in his eyes, and Pepper knows that it’s not her place to wish for more.

Only, Tony is already a step ahead of her. He leans down and kisses her, bending her back over his arm until he pulls away, leaving her breathless and confused. He cheerfully pulls her upright, smoothing the hair away from her flushed cheeks, and tells her that he’ll be waiting for her on the other side of the sparring mat before walking off. She goes home in a daze, arriving to two emails: one, giving her an extended paid leave of absence from her job at Stark Industries, and the other, accepting her enrollment into the Jaeger Academy.

Everyone hears about how Fury chews out Tony for making an unauthorized Jaeger, but Pepper doesn’t cave to the prodding questions and curious glances that follow her – she’s furious at his high-handedness but at the same time thrilled. She trades her heels and business suits for BDU boots and pants, preferring the loose tank tops that leave her arms free and unhindered, and doesn’t even speak to Tony until the drift compatibility tests in the Kwoon Combat Room. He's already there with a staff in hand, stripped down to sweatpants and sleeveless vest, and he watches her with a gleam in his eyes as Fury addresses the cadets all eager at the chance to pilot with the infamous Tony Stark.

Pepper signs up to be last, watching critically as Tony systematically decimates all the cadets, one after another. When it’s her turn, she doesn’t let the nerves show on her face, but Tony’s grin widens as she takes position at the end of the mat. Unlike with the other spars, this time he's the one who lunges first.

It’s fast and brutal – he doesn’t pull any punches, not putting his full strength behind the hits but enough to make her arms flex to fight against the force. They orbit around each other, pulling off an intricate dance of sidesteps and whirling staffs and heavy breathing until he pulls her ankle out from under her, and when she looks up the butt of a bamboo stick is right under her nose. There’s disappointment creeping into his eyes, pulling back before he stiffens and looks down – she has her staff angled delicately between his legs, and as he meets her challenging gaze his smile is bright and soft. 

When they’re dismissed, after Fury debriefs them both on standard Ranger protocols, Pepper hauls Tony into a corridor and shoves him up against the wall, his hands hot around her waist as she pours her frustration and want into her lips and tongue. She pulls back abruptly, leaving him standing there half-dazed as she walks away, and Pepper smiles to herself when she hears his footsteps come up behind her, Tony’s arm curling around her waist and drawing her into his side as he walks her back to her rooms.


	6. Sagitta Tempest || Clint Barton + Barney Barton

**Given Name: Sagitta Tempest**   
**Classification: Mark-II**   
**Pilots: Clint Barton, Barney Barton**   
**Deployment: Anchorage Shatterdome, December 2017**   
**Solo Kills: 2**   
**Team Kills: 1**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Destroyed, July 2018**

* * *

When Clint is six, he and Barney are coming home from the local school just in time to see their drunken father use a .22 caliber handgun to shoot their mother four times in the chest. Clint is young, but not young enough to misinterpret the red blossoming on his mother’s gingham checked apron. Later, Clint realizes that he’s the one who first starts to scream, but all his wailing and hollering seems soundless as their father turns the gun on his own forehead and pulls the trigger. There’s no one around for at least a mile, the house nestled firmly in Iowa’s farm country, and Clint sits numbly on the floor of the kitchen as Barney finally musters up the courage to call 9-1-1.

He just stares, alternating between the bodies of his two parents and the gore that paints the dining table and walls, until the police arrive two hours later with child services in tow. They’re dropped off at an orphanage in Waverly like old clothes being donated to a charity drive, and in the span of six hours they go from a (somewhat broken) four-person family to orphaned brothers.

Barney is quick to get over his shock, filling fourteen-year-old heart with anger and bitterness. He pushes Clint around, using the excuse “ _because I’m older and I said so_ ” to get his way, and revels in the power he holds over Clint and the rest of the kids at the orphanage, being one of the eldest and playing innocent in front of the adults. More often than not, he forces the younger kids into cruel schemes and tricks them out of their toys or belongings, collecting trinkets like trophies. It has the side effect of making the rest of the kids avoid Clint like the plague, and Clint silently mourns the brother he had from before – Barney was nicer, and smiled more. Now, he only seemed to wear a mean, nasty sort of smirk that promised nothing good, or a sullen, angry grimace.

Barney’s the reason Clint doesn’t get adopted – he became an unholy terror whenever any prospective parents come in to look at potential candidates, and most of the time managed to make it look like Clint was the guilty culprit. It gets so bad that the orphanage matron begins to lock the two up during visits, and whenever Clint would look out the window at the retreating back of a car, Barney would just say that he was protecting his little brother.

It’s the same answer to the _“why?”_ when Barney hauls Clint over his shoulder and runs away from the orphanage one hot summer night. They stow away in the storage wagon of a travelling carnival, and never look back.

They’re found eventually, but they’re taken in and put to work. Clint ends up the apprentices of Trickshot and Swordsman, and in bitterness of being overlooked Barney enlists in the Army the moment he turns eighteen, leaving everything behind and disappearing into the night.

In the Midwest, news travels slowly, especially when you’re with an old travelling carnival in an age of movies and television. Clint is seventeen when he hears about the kaiju during a pit-stop in Oklahoma, when he walks past a bar and sees the footage of the giant monsters storming San Francisco. He has a hard time believing it, and the thought leaves his mind as quickly as it came.

A week later, the carnival is in Texas, and a plain-faced man, unassuming in stature and size, approaches Clint right before show time. The man’s suit just screams _government_ , and Clint brushes the guy off, but he keeps coming back – to _every single show_ – trying to talk with Clint about things he isn’t wiling to hear.

The carnival guys give him shit about having a fanboy, making suggestive comments and lewd gestures, but Clint knows better, and wishes it were that simple. And he’s right – two nights later Phil Coulson shows up again, but this time with _his brother_ in tow and an offer into the Jaeger Academy. Barney’s in a suit, bearing a shiny FBI badge and a government issued gun, and Clint refuses to even acknowledge him for the entire duration of the whole trip to the Academy. He goes so far as to trade bunks with another new cadet in the dorms, putting the maximum amount of space between him and Barney across the room.

Barney might’ve cleaned up and clawed his way into polite society, but Clint knows his brother is the same boy that ran away years ago. He finds it fitting when their first spar makes their drift- compatibility is obvious from the start – no matter how much Barney tries to pretend otherwise – but equally obvious is how both of them try to fight for control on the sparring mat and in test simulations. It takes years for them to be shaped up into something halfway decent – Coulson’s doing, no doubt. The man checks in on them especially month after month, and after a particularly bad day in training Coulson’s at the other end of a video call once they leave the combat rooms.

They force themselves to make it work, even if they virtually ignore each other off the training mats and out of the Conn-Pod, and to this day Clint wonders if Coulson ever really realized how little was shared through their neural link besides thoughts of combat. There was only one instance when Clint let himself fall into chasing the RABIT, just to see what Barney’s reactions would be. The resulting fistfight was so bad that Coulson showed up in person at the Academy to politely inform them both that failure was not an option.

When it’s time for them to be assigned, both Clint and Barney are somewhat bitter about the fact that they’ve been dealt a patchwork of leftover pieces, when Stark and Stane were assigned to the biggest Mark-III to date six months earlier. Sagitta Tempest, their Mark-II Jaeger, was assembled right after the large wave of Category-II kaijus took out all of the Mark-I Jaeger fleet in January. With salvageable parts taken from the dead Jaegers in Oblivion Bay, Sagitta’s body is a mishmash of unmatched Mark-I pieces: the lower body of a Peruvian brawler, the torso of a Japanese stealth type, and the arms of an American long-range sniper. They’re luckier when it comes to weaponry, but when competing for funding with Ranger teams like the Stark-Stane duo, nobody looked twice at the team of two orphaned brothers from Iowa.

Still, they make it work somehow; they make do with what they get and what strings Coulson is able to pull for them. With a lack of heavy-duty artillery, Barney and Clint resign themselves to support and rescue with long-ranged arrow-like projectiles, Plasmacaster cannons, and newly designed ultra-freon generators that could stop an injured Category-II in its tracks.

Less than four months later, just after their second kaiju kill, Coulson is called into Anchorage when the brothers are nearly killed during their fourth deployment – not from the kaiju, but from a neural disconnect in the middle of battle. In the weeks following, Clint begins to see the cracks that start to break the surface, revealing the old Barney he knew was lurking underneath, only this time he’s more unstable, drunk on power and spilt kaiju blood.

Confronting Barney results in a split lip and a black eye, so Clint backs off. When he reports his suspicions to LOCCENT with no response, Clint can only watch as his brother’s unstable condition descends to madness.

 

Coulson hears and does some digging, eventually figuring it out just an hour after Sagitta’s deployment to Argentina: in the sheer panic surrounding the increasing strength of the kaiju, nobody noticed that the left pilot control was reassembled incorrectly. Barney had been controlling about 70% of the neural handshake since the two of them began piloting Sagitta, and the mental load was slowly driving him insane. He makes the necessary arrangements to retire Barney from Ranger duty and find Clint a position in the Academy until he finds a new partner, only to stop short at haunting melody that echoes through the Shatterdome.

It’s a morbidly poetic, nicknamed the “ _Jaeger’s Requiem_ ,” and Coulson’s heart drops.  

 

The effects of Barney’s mental condition culminate when they’re sent to fend off the Category-III kaiju Mortemal off the coast of Argentina, holding the kaiju off until support arrives. When the monster ends up retreating instead of continuing its attacks, Clint wants to wait for backup before pursuing while Barney insists on chasing after it. Clint argues that LOCCENT is already tracking the kaiju and their depleted reserves are nearly useless, but Barney force-ejects him from the Conn-Pod to pilot Sagitta on his own.

Clint resurfaces, emerging from his escape pod red with anger, but is stopped short by the pillar of fire and water that literally explodes in the distance, the telltale mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion lighting up the sky. When the supporting Jaegers arrives and rescue teams pickup Clint, he’s floating in the middle of the Pacific, staring blankly at the flaming wreckage and repeating Barney’s name over and over.

Clint might’ve never forgiven Barney for abandoning him, maybe even hated the man. Despite that, they were still brothers, all that remained of the Barton family – and now, Clint was all that was left.


	7. Apollo Victory || Phil Coulson + Clint Barton

**Given Name: Apollo Victory**   
**Classification: Mark-IV**   
**Pilots: Clint Barton, Phil Coulson**   
**Deployment: Los Angeles Shatterdome, May 2019**   
**Solo Kills: 0**   
**Team Kills: 3**   
**Captures: 2**   
**Status: Active**

* * *

When Phil greets the rescue team at the nearest Shatterdome in Lima, Peru, Clint is silent and ashen, broken from the loss of his brother. Phil gets him to medical, where the nurses and doctors poke and prod, but Clint does nothing but sit, cold and quiet and still. He answers in a short monotone when he’s called into debrief, his facial features carefully schooled into a blank mask.

Phil tried to get Clint to go into therapy, even goes to Fury to try and make it a direct order. Clint goes, but it’s useless – he sits in the therapist’s office staring blankly at the wall, tuning out the words, and after three months Fury all but throws his hands in the air and give Clint an ultimatum: get his head sorted out, or leave. Clint just nods once, leaving the room as silently as he came, and the next morning Phil wakes up to the news that Clint has disappeared in the night with no sign of returning.

Six years later, Phil gets a call from Fury as he’s on a recruiting mission in Mexico, and flies back to Anchorage in a hurry. When he gets there, he finds Clint in Academy fatigues, looking older but so much younger at the same time, sparring with a beautiful redheaded woman. Phil is furious and angry and so, so relieved, that he storms into the practice rooms and interrupts the spar, grabbing the woman’s staff and attacking when Clint tries to placate him with half-assed apologies. They trade blows as Phil channels his relief and frustration and six years worry into his hits – and when he comes out of his daze, Clint’s on the floor below him, eyes wide. The whole room is silent, save for Fury, who is laughing hysterically behind them.

They’re drift compatible – more than Clint and Barney ever were – and Phil pulls Clint out of the Academy that very day, bringing him back to Los Angeles with him.

When they arrive, Stark is there, waiting for them and greeting them with a smug smirk. When he leads them over to the back of the hangar, the Jaegers they pass getting newer and newer as they go on, Phil can see Clint’s eyes widen when they stop in front of a behemoth that is all sleek lines and sharp edges, lacking the familiar patchwork of welding and mismatched colors that Phil remembered from Sagitta.

Stark’s new Mark-4 Jaegers are better than any of his Mark-3s, with better strength, speed, and armor than anything anyone else is making at that moment. Sagitta looks like a bucket of junk next to Apollo Victory, painted a little too purple for Phil’s tastes and a tad too glossy for Clint, is designed to be a support and retrieval Jaeger, more lithe and emphasizing its armor and speed over strength. Meant to be used mainly for defense instead of offensive combat, Phil finds that he doesn’t mind that there aren’t any instant kill weapons like what he remembers from Jupiter. He’s a strategist at heart and doesn’t like getting his hands dirty, and Clint, even though he’s happy to be in a Conn-Pod again, avoids the violence if he’s able – the memories of Barney are still vivid.

Above all, Apollo is unique because of its task in helping collect kaiju parts for examination. Its weapons are mostly non-lethal, K-stunners and electroshock missiles meant to permanently paralyze and disable kaiju nervous systems instead of outright killing them, and on their first deployment, Phil and Clint are the first Ranger team to successfully capture a live kaiju and bring it to Hong Kong.

Their next two attempts end up in killing two directly, and they slip into the background to let Tony and Pepper take the credit. They end up catching one more kaiju, paralyzing it as new Jaeger Scylla Charbydis pins it in place, but again, they step back to let the other Ranger team take the credit. Phil is happy to remain in the shadows, but Clint’s ulterior motive is made clear when Scylla’s pilots are unmasked. He’s grinning when the world damn near explodes when it’s revealed that the pilots who pinned the kaiju are the PPDC’s first female Ranger team: Maria Hill, and the infamous Black Widow herself, Natasha Romanoff.


	8. Scylla Charybdis || Natasha Romanova + Maria Hill

**Given Name: Scylla Charybdis**   
**Classification: Mark-III**   
**Pilots: Natasha Romanova, Maria Hill**   
**Deployment: Los Angeles Shatterdome, January 2018**   
**Solo Kills: 6**   
**Team Kills: 3**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Active**

* * *

 

When Natasha joins the American Jaeger Academy in Anchorage, she has a plan: keep her head down, draw as little attention as physically possible, and keep her guard up. She and Clint agree to lie low for a few years, to downplay their skills and graduate as a drift compatible Ranger team when their demons have calmed and their cards can afford to be held not so close to their chests.

That plan gets shot to hell by the man to storms into the practice rooms and snatches her staff from her hands, and she has to physically restrain herself from lunging when the man turns and starts attacking Clint. She only holds herself back because Clint _lets_ the man get a few hits in, and by the whispers around her she realizes that _this_ is Phil Coulson, the man Clint had told her about.

Clint doesn’t hold himself back for long, though – he lets Phil get a good blow to the mouth, blood dripping from his lips, but the bloody smile is all challenge and determination as Clint jumps into the fight, all pretenses of pretending gone. Natasha can feel all her plans slipping through her fingers as Clint and Phil spar, the murmurs quieting to silent awe, and dimly she can hear Marshal Fury laughing in the background.

In the days that follow, Clint only manages to give her a quick explanation and a goodbye before he’s whisked away to Los Angeles, and suddenly she’s alone. It’s hard to keep the pretense up when she’s fighting against other cadets, cadets who look at her bright red hair and her curves and her breasts. She can see the lust in their eyes, the smirks that follow her now that Clint is gone, and she breaks character in the middle of a sparring session with a leering cadet called Hodgins when he has the audacity to pin her to the mats, hands above her head as he whispers into her ear.

Dimly, Natasha can hear the stern bark of someone over the tittering of the men surrounding the mats, and from her peripheral vision she sees the slight stature of a woman with dark hair tied back into a severe bun – she ignores all this in favor of the blood rushing in her ears, the way the man on top of her is crassly grinding his hips into her stomach, and the feeling of his damp panting against the skin of her neck as he mutters all the lewd things he wants to do to her.

She hasn’t fallen into battle-lust in years, but when the red haze fills her vision she’s too furious to pull it back.

She doesn’t remember much of what happened after. She only has her split knuckles; the rest of her is unmarked and uninjured, but from the way the other cadets stare and move out of her way in the mess hall, she figures she’s blown her cover. She sits alone at a table, steadfastly ignoring the gazes of the rest of the room, and only looks up when someone slides into the seat across from her. It’s the dark-haired woman from the sparring room, and when the woman smiles, it’s all teeth.

The woman’s name is Maria Hill, and Natasha recognizes the name as one of Director Fury’s personally trained cadets. Maria comments between bites of her stew that Hodgins is in medical, with matching sets of broken femurs and tibias, a torn ACL, torn rotator cuffs at his shoulders, fractured wrists, and seven broken ribs. Natasha is silent as Maria says that the man will never be a Ranger, and Natasha refuses to look contrite as she simply says, _“good.”_

Maria smiles again, and this time, it’s genuine.

Natasha drops her act after. To the astonishment of her peers, she shoots to the top of her class and graduates within two months, partnered with Maria and sent to Los Angeles to be assigned a Jaeger. When they arrive, Natasha discovers that there’s talk amongst the personnel of the Los Angeles Shatterdome, rumors that she was once one of Russia’s Red Room trainees. Whispers follow her though the corridors, the most common story being that she failed the mental reconstruction process necessary for the Russian pilots, but to Natasha’s surprise, Maria doesn’t say a word about it.

During their first drive test, Natasha deliberately chases the RABIT, stepping back to let Maria watch. Their subsequent tests are flawless, but when Maria doesn’t mention anything, Natasha is too curious to not ask. And when she does, Maria just gives her an odd little smile, and says, _“we have better things to worry about.”_

They’re given leave to pilot a Mark-3 Jaeger that was built up from the salvaged parts of Mark-2s like Iron Monger. Clint is furious when he first hears, but Stark’s reconstructions are eons beyond the disaster that was Sagitta – their Jaeger is a hybrid of new and old, and Stark refuses to reuse old weapons and tech, outfitting the Jaeger with upgrades specially tailored to Maria and Natasha’s requests. It is, for all intents and purposes, an entirely new Jaeger, even if it takes Clint time to see it that way.

They dub it Scylla Charybdis, and the name could not be more apt – the finesse and grace of Natasha and Maria’s personal fighting styles lend themselves towards speed and agility, but they attack with the precision of a strategist and the strength of a hurricane. They have few weapons – electroshock missiles that launch from Scylla’s wrists and a nuclear plasma launcher as a finishing card – because they prefer to get the job done with their bodies alone.

On their first deployment, they help Apollo capture a kaiju – alive. Phil and Clint refuse to be in the spotlight, and while neither Maria nor Natasha like the attention, they take the credit because Fury insists on it. They’re a mystery to the media, new to the Jaeger-kaiju scene, and when they unmask themselves in front of the media during the post-attack press conference, a hush falls over the crowd as the two women stand side by side, stoic and proud. Then, everyone explodes into chaos.

It takes little time before Scylla holds the record for the most kaiju kills in the whole West Pacific. In the male-dominated world of Rangers, it brings the two of them an unprecedented amount of hate, misogyny, and scrutiny. It’s easy to ignore it though – they take out their frustrations on the Academy trainees, filled with type-A jocks and assholes that are shut down as quickly when Maria pins them to the training mats. And if they manage to last against Maria, Natasha is all too happy to put them back in their places.

It goes like this for a while, until a dark-haired, lean man takes down Maria faster than anyone before, and matches Natasha move for move. Natasha holds a hand up, and the man stops, and her heart drops to her stomach when the man looks more closely at Natasha’s face and his eyes fill with recognition.

“Is that you, Talia?”   
  
“… _Yasha?_ ”


	9. Chernaya Dyra || Natasha Romanova + James Barnes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Chernaya Dyra_ means "Black Hole" in Russian.

**Given Name: Chernaya Dyra**  
**Classification: Mark-I**  
**Pilots: Natasha Romanova, James Barnes**  
**Deployment: Vladivostok Shatterdome, December 2016**  
**Solo Kills: 2**  
**Team Kills: 0**  
**Captures: 0**  
**Status: Destroyed, June 2017**

* * *

 

Before she was Natasha, Ranger and co-pilot of Scylla Charybdis, she was Talia, Red Room trainee and co-pilot of Chernaya Dyra, Russia’s last Mark-1 Jaeger. It’s a behemoth, a juggernaut brawler that is equipped with every kaiju-effective weapon under the sun, from plasma-cannons and missile launchers to flamethrowers and liquid nitrogen blasters, but it’s not a reflection of _her_ the way Scylla is. Chernaya is the mirror of her co-pilot, a man large and broad and willing to do anything to finish the mission, and it isn’t until she enters the drift with Maria that Natasha realizes that she and her partner for Chernaya were _anything_ but compatible inside the Conn-Pod.

She tries to forget, but it’s easy to bring back the memories with the man from her past standing in front of her. When they had met, Yasha was merely a few years older than her, but outfitted with a metal prosthetic where his left arm should be and freshly brainwashed by the Red Room. He was a blank slate, perfect for pairing with the woman who failed the neural-wipe but cost too much to lose, but it took only two years for the cracks to show.

They were different in every possible way. She taught herself to reign in emotion, suppressing it beneath focus and drive, where he was fueled by his frustration and rage despite his outward blank mask. She preferred hand-to-hand fighting, using stealth and speed to weave around her opponents to confuse and elude, where he dove in head first, using powerful moves to overwhelm his opponents until they submitted to his strength. She didn’t like using weapons, but he was willing to use anything he could get his hands on, the bigger the better.

Yet, outside the Conn-Pod and the drive suits, away from monsters and Jaegers and the Red Room, they _worked_. It had been the sex, finding comfort in each other when they didn’t know how else to express themselves, and she wonders now if that was how they had held on for so long when they were clearly never meant to drift together.

Looking back, Natasha knows that the way they operated as co-pilots had been nothing short of a miracle. Chernaya had gone back and forth between their fighting styles, switching between her and Yasha throughout battle. It put a mental strain on them both – dominating a Jaeger’s combat style means taking on more of the neural load – and Chernaya only managed to kill two kaiju before Yasha’s mind broke in the middle of fighting a Category-III near Dalnegorsk. He chased the RABIT, bringing Natasha into the memory of another Jaeger battle, only it was Yasha with a blonde man instead of her. And then there was black, and Natasha woke up to a white hospital ceiling.

Chernaya had been dumped quickly and quietly, the two of them brought back to the Red Room for a second neural wipe, but it failed on her again. This time, they decided to eliminate her, but she fought her way out of the Vladivostok Shatterdome, pausing only once to think back to Yasha before running. She had made her way through Europe and across the Atlantic, dodging Red Room operatives for years until she landed in Toronto. There was where she met Clint, who had the same look Yasha did, lost and broken, and it was only then that she finally let herself feel regret for leaving her lover in the hands of the Red Room.

They travelled together up and down the Atlantic coast and away from the Pacific, using darts and a map to choose their next location. After a few years, it landed on Anchorage, and although she knew she wasn’t ready, she followed Clint back.

And now, standing in front of Yasha, she doesn’t know what to do.

 _“It’s James,”_ he says, and he looks softer than he ever has, the same as she remembers but without the blankness masking his face. _“I got out.”_

It is the first time in years that Natasha laughs, open and _happy_ , for once – and when he grabs her hand and pulls her into his chest, she doesn’t resist.


	10. Valkyrie Freedom || Thor Odinson + Loki Odinson

**Given Name: Valkyrie Freedom (formerly: Golden Aesir)**   
**Classification: Mark-III**   
**Pilots: Thor Odinson, Loki Odinson**   
**Deployment: Vladivostok Shatterdome, July 2020 (formerly: Sydney Shatterdome, June 2018)**   
**Solo Kills: 3**   
**Team Kills: 3**   
**Captures: 0**   
**Status: Active**

* * *

Thor and Loki Odinson are brothers visiting Sydney, Australia when the first wave of kaiju attacks arrives in 2014. Their father is still in Norway on business, meant to join the family the next day, when a Category-I kaiju bursts out of the water, crushing the Syndey Opera House under its feet before turning to the city.

They’re barely out of high school, more boys than men, and both are still with shock as the world seems to end around them. They can only watch with horror as the monster advances, closer and closer to where they stand, and it’s only when a pair of hands seizes their shoulders that they snap out of it.

Their mother Frigga pulls them out of the way, screaming at them to run, and for a tiny, golden moment, Thor and Loki think that they are safe. They’re proved wrong, though, when Frigga pushes the two of them into a rescue dinghy just as a kaiju breaks the earth, sending fissures running through the city and ocean water flooding through the streets. The brothers can only watch in horror as their mother is swept away by the torrent of seawater, hands still stretched towards them as the other shell-shocked survivors held them back.

After the kaiju is killed, four days later, Thor and Loki manage to escape into the remains of Sydney. They join the rescue teams and search for weeks, but they never find Frigga’s body.

It takes years before they’re allowed in a Conn-Pod, stonewalled by their father and too immersed in finding vengeance to pass the psych evaluations, but they manage it, somehow. Their first drift test together is like nothing either of them have ever known, and to the brothers, it’s like coming home.

It’s easy after that. They quickly climb up the ranks to claim the title of Australia’s best Jaeger co-pilots, working in tandem with two other Aussie Ranger teams. Breaker Wildfire is a heavyweight wrestling type, driven by Hogun Grim and Volstagg Valiant, and Striker Iris is Breaker’s counterpart – lithe, agile, and built to use their opponent’s strength against them – piloted by Fandral Dashing and Sif Sylvan. The Odinson brothers sit somewhere between the two with their Mark-III Jaeger, Golden Aesir – equipped with a hammer-arm on its right side and a series of exploding projectile launchers on its left, it has all the heavy artillery expected from a front line fighter, but its surprising agility lends itself for unexpected maneuvers. It’s just the cherry on top when they’re given Stark tech immune to the EMP attacks the higher category kaiju are beginning to develop, and they develop a reputation for being the front lines of attack – the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Things go to disaster when they fail to defeat a Category-IV kaiju named Bilgesnipe. The monster emerges not more than five miles from the New Zealand coast, and by the time Thor and Loki get suited up and are deployed in Aesir, the kaiju has already made its rampage through Auckland, heading inland and ripping the landscape apart.

Never mind that it is a solo deployment, or that they had mobilized as quickly as possible. Millions are dead, the city is now a ruin, and everyone wants someone to blame – so all eyes turn to Thor and Loki, and they go from national heroes to the most hated people in Australia in the matter of a few hours.

When they receive the summons from the PPDC Council in Hong Kong, it comes with the cruel, bitter realization that their own father, now in charge of the Sydney Shatterdome, has called for their dismissal. Thor storms into Odin’s office in a fit of rage, shouting and screaming and punching through the walls, but Loki just watches in silence, his face cold and furious. Odin is impersonal, gruff and stern and everything a father shouldn’t be, and when Loki prods and pokes at him enough to incite a response, the older man spits out the truth.

He’s still bitter over the death of his wife, irrationally placing the blame on his sons for surviving when she didn’t. The property damage will cost the Shatterdome billions, billions that they do not have and money that they need to spend on Jaeger upkeep – only, what is one less Jaeger in a fleet? And last of all, the administrators want them gone – there had been whispers of nepotism when Thor and Loki were given Aesir, whispers and dirty looks following them around the Shatterdome, and as the opportunity presents itself, they pounce on the opportunity to remove the brothers from the equation.

Thor and Loki go to the hearing in Hong Kong, stoic and emotionless as they are ordered to return to base to be dismissed from the Jaeger program. They return to Sydney, silent and subdued, but when Thor voices the craziest idea he’s ever had, Loki is just desperate enough to go along with it.

It takes the help of Hogun, Volstagg, Fandral, and Sif to help them carry out the plan. They’re distractions, mostly – meant to keep Odin and the bigwig administrators busy, but it’s Sif who has the stroke of genius. She manages to hack the Shatterdome servers, make it look like a kaiju attack was heading towards Melbourne, and from there it’s easy to coerce and charms and wheedle their way to where Aesir sits in the docking bay. Somehow they manage to talk their way back into the Conn-Pod, drivesuits prepped and Aesir ready, and when they’re launched for deployment they cut the cables and head north, heedless of the calls coming from Sydney.

They wade along the Asian coast and take refuge in Russia, where there is no extradition treaty and where Odin has no pull. It’s there that they rename their Jaeger Valkyrie Freedom, in memory of their mother. The woman had always loved Norse myths, but the word _freedom_ came from their mother’s namesake – and while they were still around, Thor and Loki swore that they’d do their best to keep the world free from fear, for as long as they could.

**Author's Note:**

> I know I shouldn't be posting a new story, not when I still have _hold my hand, consign me not to darkness_ and _tourmaline rhapsody_ waiting for updates, but I couldn't resist :( 
> 
> Still, hope you guys like it, and if anyone wants to guess the rationale behind the Jaeger names, feel free to take a stab at it -- and any ideas for kaiju names are welcome too!
> 
> ** Title from _In the Shallows_ , by Daughter


End file.
